inclusivity isn’t the problem, it’s when the show adds senseless inclusivity but gets lazy with storytelling, or pushes a message or an idea on either side of the political spectrum, rather than letting the viewer just enjoy their program without feeling some weird measure of imposed guilt. for example, great inclusivity can be found in Disney classics like Atlantis, Lilo & Stitch, Princess & the Frog, Coco, Encanto, Mulan, and elsewhere like From Scratch on Netflix, Ep. 3 of The Last of Us, ThePeacemaker, and Ginny & Georgia and Single all the Way on Netflix. whereas The Rings of Power, Velma, Willow, Jurassic World; Dominion, She-Hulk, to name a recent few, are examples of what can be described as woke.
The hallmarks of being woke, i find, are lackluster storytelling, wherein the dialogue, plot, and pacing are off, but every chance are given to moments of grandstanding wherein the MC or side character takes a moment to literally lecture someone, ie the audience or a villain of the show. for example we have the last episode of Hawkeye and the Winter soldier (“you’ve got to do better, senator”). typically, the villain on the receiving end is a person in power, of wealth, white, male or of an ethnically multitudinous background, or all four, and is often portrayed as spoiled, weak, arrogant, childish, and greedy (ie Hodgens in Jurassic World; Dominion). often, if it is a rebooted franchise, it’ll bring back old favorite cast members, but they’ll often be deconstructed and reverted back from their former glory, to allow the MC to shine better alongside them, oftentimes retconning the original story to fit the narrative they’re trying to create for their new product (Luke Skywalker)
and i use product specifically; everything feels cheap and forced and the whole thing feels like it’s come off a production line, rather than something with real effort or artistic inspiration, or at the very least an intention of fun escapism put in. the quality is often lower despite the more vast sums spent on the final product, oftentimes reshoots are called for because the studio knows that the finished result is shit but they want to try and polish the turd so they can cash in on the name of a successful franchise, and oftentimes the result is entirely forgettable. the whole thing feels like it’s made by algorithm and almost none of it is original. we saw this with John Wick; it was an original film and it was very successful because it was new and unknown and people loved it, and then it got franchised to hell. they’re on what, 5?
then there’s the flexible morality of the characters. it’s cool when i kidnap, violate national borders, hoard resources and adopt a policy of isolationism, but when you do it it’s considered imperialism, warmongering and greedy? (Wakanda Forever, which especially pissed me off because it basically undid everything T’Challa achieved in Black Panther). or how about when i commit genocide; but it’s okay because i’m the good guy, and i’m trying to save a city, and forget relocating your people, i’m just going to end you? (Doctor Who, Vampires of Venice. If Eccleston was the Doctor of War, and Tennant was the Doctor of healing, then Smith was the Doctor that wielded power like a child with his fathers gun and couldn’t care less who he hurt).
throughout all this i haven’t mentioned race because it has nothing to do with it. sure, woke films are more racially diverse, and yes, oftentimes it doesn’t make sense (Vikings; Valhalla, a conversation for another time), but that’s not where i hit the woke button. i hit it when the movie seems less like story telling and more like a lesson i’m being subjected to under the guise of a beloved franchise or character and it feels forced and out of place, like that dude at a metal concert with the sign and the megaphone telling everyone to repent, except here the guy is on stage with the band and he’s louder than the music. i can’t enjoy the concert anymore and i just want someone to throw him off so we’re all can go back to having a good time.
i can explain it just fine, because i’ve had to. i have siblings who will automatically jump gun and call me a racist or a bigot when i try to explain why i don’t like something that’s considered woke. it’s frustrating.
I get where you’re coming from, but as you say- being preachy or poorly paced or otherwise slap dash crap or “forced product” aren’t exclusive traits to inclusive productions. Likewise hypocrisy and conflicted or problematic morality aren’t either. I mean Star Wars is an actual war, they blew up the death star. It was the size of a small moon. I’m not going to debate wether that was necessary or right or whatever- the point is that they did it. The “good guys” routinely use convenient logic or selfish thinking or obviously flawed logic etc.
heavy handed Moralizing is another one that has always been around and still is, especially in animation and “all audiences” films. Pixar is sort of the bench mark of changing the game in that regard and creating more subtle and complex ways to still have an obvious central theme but being less in one’s face with it.
Those born before or too young to recall a world before all that grew up in a world where more subtle “all ages films” were the norm- so I can’t fault anyone of a certain age for thinking the way the world more or less was for a good chunk of history is some new trend because they weren’t there to see a world before subtlety was more a norm. It’s also not fair to say that inclusion hasn’t sparked a resurgence of that outdated story telling as content makers struggle to figure out how to tell stories that are intentionally inclusive. So this isn’t me coming after you or anyone else, but I feel like often times with things like this, if we compare and remove the things that aren’t exclusive or inherent to “inclusive” media projects as factors, often we can come to a place where the chief difference to be upset about is that a film included different kinds of people and perspectives, or that a film made an effort to include or appease certain groups. That said….
I’m not coming after you or saying your feelings can’t be valid. I don’t think I know anyone including myself who hasn’t rolled their eyes or such when the multi sexual, multi cultural and or ambiguous, “differently abled” gender fluid, Wiccan, neural divergent adopted character rolled out in their wheel chair and showcased the superpowers that their existence imparts in the story.
It doesn’t mean someone has a problem with people like that, and while the description is a bit of tongue in cheek hyperbole, I’m sure that at least one person in the world might feel they are getting a rare chance to see a character like them and that isn’t bad- the problem isn’t that the character exists or is capable, the problem is that quite often they are “tacked on.” Inclusivity and pandering certainly aren’t the same thing. A long standing problem is one where if you simply remove the adjectives- there would be no difference or no difference of consequence to the story or character.
The “color swap” where you literally just take a script like the show “friends” and make a character a POC or under represented group, but you keep the writing exactly the same. If Ross and Monica from friends were black, but the entire show was exactly the same- would that be “inclusive”? Or the “token,” where you have a character hold certain traits but that character and their identity have no impact or real representation in the plot. They are perhaps a “B story” or “C story.” This is of course a stance fraught with peril. Are there no black characters that live and think and speak and act like Ross from Friends? One of the greatest female film icons- Ellen Ripley from aliens- was essentially a “color swap,” written as a man and changed to a woman. The Alien franchise at least did put effort into making some changes and incorporating a sense of identity to the character and plot to match the shift, but that also illustrates the problem.
We make certain assumptions about identity. Ripley and Newts relationship and plot were anchored to the fact she is a woman and her own, and the audiences willingness to receive it, “maternal instinct.” A man could lose a child and go to extremes to try and save a little girl that wasn’t theirs, but the perception and impact tend to be different. Scenes like learning to use the pulse riffle etc. probably would be much different with a male Ripley, and female characters generally face sexual violence and trauma we don’t usually get with males. One might say that disproportionate occur above reflects reality, but this is film. It is generally divorced from reality, often in completely or vastly different worlds that aren’t our own. In whatever universe Rambo occurs in- maybe men are subject to more frequent sexual assault? We already are believing fantastic things that diverge from reality, so what’s one difference?
In Avatar, Jake is in a wheel chair. This is a central plot point and device at times, his motivation to be on Pandora, his feelings of depression and loss and inability are at his characters Core and his former military status along with his desire to still be useful despite his “condition” are key to his moral conflict and relationship to the military officer who he is acting as an agent for. But Jake is trying to be “cured,” he is miserable and “broken.” This is often a trope where characters have “different abilities” and it is something many in those communities get upset over. The idea that being non sighted or non hearing or non ambulatory are a “curse” and something that people would “cure” if they could as opposed to a valid state of being.
But of course there ARE people born or having come in to a different set of ability levels who do hate it or aspects of it, who are miserable and depressed. Who do see it as something they’d want to be rid of. Of course there are black people who would fit in fine in the friends line up without any need for a single change, Ross or Phoebe or any of the characters could be black or Asian or whatever else and not need a single change. There is no “<insert group>” experience in a singular sense. For a long time, and to a degree even now, characters of color and stories about characters of color were often historical pieces about victimization, criminal stories, “wrong side of the tracks” stories and such emphasizing low socio economic and educational status and existence as outsiders. That IS a valid experience for many, but not all. In fact having a character with certain differences from a “traditional” mold doesn’t need to focus on those differences at all.
So it is tough. If you include various types of representation and don’t make their identity a strong focus many will get upset and say it is generic. If you make sure to heavily lean on identity people get upset for pandering or tokenism or viewing a group through a singular lens. You generally just really can’t represent everyone, even everyone from a specific group, in one story. What makes it truly tough is the nature of the medium. A place were eating and using the bathroom only occur as plot devices. Danny Trejo could easily be a doctor or a scientist or whatever else- but he “looks like a gangster” to many, so they give him lots of roles like that. That’s the nature of film. It’s fiction and we know it is fiction. In the real world strange things happen, the “writing is bad,” peoples faces and names etc. don’t “fit” our perception of their personality or their jobs etc. but a film World most of the time, even one where everything seems the same as our world- is a fictional world
An alternate reality where police procedures or laws differ, physics differs. People survive the dead and die from the preventable. Cars and bullets and aircraft, gravity and mass etc. work to the story tellers will. Social cues and conditioning are different. People react and behave in ways that aren’t generally “real,” and that’s sort of inherent to the whole enterprise because generally speaking, most people their average day either wouldn’t make a good film that would make money, or it is so close but needs lots of editing and maybe a few changes to work in a medium where you have maybe 60-320 or so minutes to tell a story and make people feel and you need them to follow along and understand things but have to balance what you show and tell against exposition or insulting intelligence- while creating a narrative and pace. Life tends to have lousy pacing as well.
In real life what is, is. There can be many reasons but it is. We, especially the young, didn’t make the world. It is hard, ridiculous even, to pin a 10 or 16 year old kid with a complex system of economic repression going back to slavery and before when calling out their privilege considering st this point in life they have probably done very little to impact the world at all and most of what they have and the life they live has been at their parents direction and deed. When we walk into fiction though, the world is what the maker made it. So their conscious and subconscious biases and life experiences are shaping what you see. It isn’t fair to entirely look at the maker(s) either though- suspension of disbelief requires the audience to play along. Even the craziest sci fi fantasy is underpinned by connections of our world we have no reason to believe would exist. These works are usually shown in our own language except where some mystery or hint of strangeness what’s to be shown.
Greetings and social structures and interactions, manners and mannerisms, slang and relationships and all sorts of subtle things follow closely to the real world and technology is usually used in the way we’d think to use it or would be “cool” to us but not usually considered in a realistic manner because… you aren’t creating a world, you’re creating a world for present day audiences to watch. If we can’t understand the motivations and emotions of the characters because their psychology and culture are so different from ours- most people will be lost. Most people don’t want to memorize 1000 years of complex histories and politics to watch a brand new film for the first time. If you pull people in with the world they may want to know more, like LOTR or Star Trek/wars, but on day one asking people to memorize and track complex things just to be able to understand the film doesn’t usually work.
That same mechanism comes into play with representation. The film world generally has to be relatable to the audience. They don’t have time or likely the desire to learn all the subtle and often overlooked things we take for granted that make the world navigable to us. You tether the story to reality, so then when creating representation in film, the “reality” we chose as a tether is telling of us and the audience.
So it’s complicated. I’m going to say that not liking a specific “inclusive” or “progressive” work doesn’t imply prejudice in a person. I’m going to say that many “inclusive” works are by nature perhaps insulting or prejudiced. But, tbh a lot of it comes down to what we take in with us and what we want to take out. We know MCU fans are more likely to overlook things with the MCU or put a positive spin. This movie isn’t “bad,” it’s a necessary bridge to the big movie coming!
Apple fans will tend to see positives in apple product choices where others see negatives and so forth. Is this because they are fans or are they fans because they share a similar view? Maybe a little of both or case by case?
It’s a tough thing to puzzle out, and sadly we are often the worst judges of our own character and thoughts.
If it were so easy to not be a narcissist because we “know we aren’t even if others say we are” then the world might have no narcissists- but usually it is some external observer that will note the trait before the internal observer does, if they ever do. Of course that that mean that anyone who is called a narcissist is one, and their thoughts and feelings are inherently wrong? No. It’s more complex. I will say that in my opinion, it takes more than one’s tastes in films to determine if they are a bigot. I doubt most people reading this have watched mostly Turkish films this year, but that doesn’t mean one dislikes Turkey. So I don’t know. Do you. It’s good to take self inventory and to consider the perspectives of others, and maybe the problem is less in having certain opinions than it is in the way opinions are often shared in this Information Age.
heavy handed Moralizing is another one that has always been around and still is, especially in animation and “all audiences” films. Pixar is sort of the bench mark of changing the game in that regard and creating more subtle and complex ways to still have an obvious central theme but being less in one’s face with it.
It doesn’t mean someone has a problem with people like that, and while the description is a bit of tongue in cheek hyperbole, I’m sure that at least one person in the world might feel they are getting a rare chance to see a character like them and that isn’t bad- the problem isn’t that the character exists or is capable, the problem is that quite often they are “tacked on.” Inclusivity and pandering certainly aren’t the same thing. A long standing problem is one where if you simply remove the adjectives- there would be no difference or no difference of consequence to the story or character.
Apple fans will tend to see positives in apple product choices where others see negatives and so forth. Is this because they are fans or are they fans because they share a similar view? Maybe a little of both or case by case?
It’s a tough thing to puzzle out, and sadly we are often the worst judges of our own character and thoughts.